Last year, the CGIAR Consortium Board approved an open access and data management policy (see http://www.cgiar.org/resources/open).

It obliges centers and CRPs to make all information products Open Access, subject to legal rights and legitimate interests of stakeholders and third parties. Beyond any obligation it is also part of an ‘open and accessible‘ commitment ILRI has made through its knowledge sharing and communication in recent years.

To help implement the policy, the consortium office released draft guidelines which attracted much feedback and comment. Two weeks ago a small group of knowledge and data managers met in Mexico to review these. You can see the meeting summary and other resources at https://sites.google.com/a/cgxchange.org/2014-data-km-cop-meeting/.

Key points arising are:

1. the ‘guidelines’ will be drastically reduced to a set of ‘essential elements’ that each center (and by proxy each CRP) needs to attend to.
2. the centers are recognized to be the leads for this (lead centers will make sure their CRPs comply)
3. the guidelines will be supported by a set of complementary and recommended resources to help them make progress (something like the pathways at http://www.ciard.net)
4. an open access funding proposal is with the fund council to help move all this forward.

ILRI is quite well positioned. The essential elements will include having

1) open repository of open access outputs (cgspace, we have);

2) appropriate open licenses (creative commons, we have);

3) open data repositories (in process with RMG);

4) Intellectual assets policy (we have)

5) use of some cg-wide core metadata/taxonomies (we can contribute);

6) guidance on ethics (in process through IREC);

7) an open access implementation plan for ILRI as well as the livestock and fish CRP (we have most of the elements).

There will almost certainly be some additional funds from the open access project that we can use to address any areas in all this that require greater attention.

They consortium is very keen to build on (and support) the cgspace repository we developed; that now has L&F, CCAFS and WLE content as well as several centers (CIAT, Bioversity in process) and and can be part of a wider ‘open.cgiar.org’ portal to access all CGIAR knowledge products.